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We can begin to see why my research has had the trajectory it has. I set out to find a scientific basis for the moral and psychological issues which worried me as a young man. I thought I could do so by understanding the theoretical basis for the sciences underlying mental functions.1
From his first years as a young scholar to his last years as a therapist, it was Bob's intellectual habit to cite E. A. Burtt and A. N. Whitehead on the origins of modern science. When as a student in Cambridge (this was 1966), I inquired about transferring to the history and philosophy of science (HPS), in which Bob had recently been appointed Lecturer, he told me to read Burtt and Whitehead. I did so with the kind of special attention which showed something spoke to my concern (to use an old Quaker expression). The framing argument of Burtt's book on The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (originally published in ) was a touchstone for Bob. He thought it stated the theme which was, or should be, of basic importance for inquiry into human nature: the relation between humane intuition of what it is to be human (‘mind’) and modern scientific knowledge (‘body’). He believed Burtt had shown how this relation should be critically investigated through the intellectual history of science. In Whitehead, Bob found authoritative argument, which he often discussed in terms of ‘the mind-body problem’, as to why modern science and a humane vision were adrift, even opposed.
In this piece remembering Bob, I use his references to Burtt and Whitehead to posit a trajectory in Bob's life. He was an intensely embodied intellectual and subjectively well knew mind and body work together. But in this essay I shall tell an intellectual story and not personalize it in psychological terms. During his life he changed from being a medical student to become a historian of mind and brain and Darwin scholar, accompanied by becoming a libertarian Marxist and radical activist in contemporary science, f